


An Assemblage of Many Properties

by Merixcil



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Gen, Humor, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26665183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Having scraped the bottom of the entertainment barrel, Lister decides to go for broke and pick up a book.
Relationships: Dave Lister & Arnold Rimmer
Kudos: 14





	An Assemblage of Many Properties

He’d never be able to live it down if it got out, but Lister had read a few books in his time. Not so much when he was a nipper, though his gran had let him keep his cereal boxes long enough to go through the ingredients on the back over breakfast, but once he started skiving off secondary school he needed somewhere to spend his weekdays, and the Central Library in Liverpool was always open. Harlequin romances were his poison, till the librarian found him wanking off to one in the disabled toilets and issued him a lifetime ban from all book-based establishments on Earth.

Which was hardly fair, seeing as it was more an attempted wank than the real thing. The descriptions of sex in those books were so purple that it was a whole lot of bother just popping a stiffy to them. Fortune favours the persistent, though, so Lister did his best to see what got Mrs Elvin next door so hot and bothered. It was a sight more adventurous than sinking into the endless online holo-porn reruns that had captured his classmates’ attention.

After that, pickings had been slim. Lister had read a couple of books on Picasso (plonker) and Van Gough (nutcase) and even listened to some antique podcasts by the original Hologram Picasso (double plonker with a side of smeghead) to strengthen his art school application, but he needn’t have bothered for all the good that did him. Besides, it had been a total hassle finding a creepy older stranger to buy books for him. His one later life encounter with the romance novellas of his youth came in the form of a discarded classic – Pounded In The Butt By The Sentient Manifestation Of My Twitch Stream by Chuck Tingle - marinating in the gutter after a heavy night of drinking to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. It had done little more than given him confused feelings about the internet that had taken more than a few months to calm down.

So when Dave Lister, aged twenty four plus three million years in a stasis chamber, deigned to crack the spine of a great brick of a book with no plot, no sex and no descriptions of the chiselled abs of a Twitch comment feed, it was a sign that things were getting desperate. But make no mistake, this was not simply a desperate grab at any new form of entertainment to while away the years while they made their way back to Earth. This was a targeted manoeuvre, designed to piss Rimmer off as much as humanly possible.

“Afternoon, Listy! Good to see you sitting up in bed so bright and early. Saving up plenty of energy for your trip to the canteen this evening, no doubt.” Rimmer marches into the room, unusually pointy nose held high in the air like he had anyone to perform his smugness too who might give a shit. “I was getting worried you were going to sleep straight through your three o’clock soap opera binge.”

“Har har.” Lister rolled his eyes. “I’ve been up for hours, y’know? Got dressed and everythin’, even eaten breakfast.”

“That’s what you look like dressed?” Rimmer asked, incredulous. “You look like the winner of a worst dressed hobo competition.”

“What are you talking about, man? This is me best pair of long johns. I wore these to that dance Hollister threw three weeks out of Titan. These are the clothes I was wearing the last time I went on the pull.”

“And I’m sure you attracted many a rabid female dog that night. Tell me, is it considered bestiality if your DNA has been so warped by inbreeding that it more closely resembles a pineapple than the human genome?”

“Of course not! Besides, you know it's against the JMC code of conduct to have a rabid female dog on board.”

“That didn’t stop you and the cat.”

Lister let the book fall closed, staring helplessly at the ceiling over his bunk. Sometimes winding Rimmer up was more trouble than it was worth. “For your information, I got the number of three of the canteen girls that night, including the one with the moustache! And I wound up snogging Miller out by the vending machines on D Deck.”

The ramrod straight line of Rimmer’s spine found a few extra kinks to work out as his arms went stiff by his sides and his lips pinched tight. “Ah, but…but…but you see…but…” He raised a chastising finger in Lister’s face, mouth flapping and eyes growing wide in horror as he realised he had nothing to say for himself. His Ionian prudishness never failed to lose him an argument.

“But what, Rimmer?” Lister countered with a shit eating grin.

Having drawn in a great gulp of air, Rimmer composed himself. “Well, there can’t have been many people on board who shared your predilections. I’m sure all you had to do was walk up to Miller and tell him you were as bent as Bent Bob and he’d have bent himself over a mess table for you. That’s an easy conquest, Lister. It’s practically cheating.”

“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, Rimmer, Earth folk don’t have the same hang-ups as you Moonies.”

“It’s not a hang-up, it’s a perfectly natural disgust towards an unnatural act.”

“Unnatural? Rimmer, all kissing is unnatural! You know about any other species that kiss? It’s just us, man. Just humans sticking our tongues in each other’s mouths for fun. It’s all weird.”

“All I know is, I see another man and I just…I don’t get it, Lister. I don’t know how anyone could possibly be excited by that.” Rimmer’s eyes glazed over and Lister braced himself for some fantastical macho tale of the hologram’s sexual exploits that was, if he was being generous, highly embellished. “I like the supple, nubile body of a woman. Long hair and breasts and…everything else.” He finished with a nondescript handwave around his crotch that could have meant anything. It was embarrassing, and kind of sad, but Lister would be smegged if he had to be the one to drag Rimmer’s head out of the proverbial toilet bowl on this one.

Lister looked down at himself. “Well smeg me. I’m gonna have to watch out that you don’t dry to feel me up in me sleep if that’s all it takes for you to want your end in.”

“Oh shut up!” Rimmer snapped. “I have four hours of astro-navigation revision to get through before dinner and the last thing I need is your outrageous accusations throwing me off my groove.”

“I didn’t say nothin’”

“You know very well what you said!” Rimmer tried to growl, but his voice was so nasal and whiny that it came out as more of a whinge.

Rimmer got stuck into his routine of trying to locate the revision schedule that was taped up on the wall in the same place as always, so Lister returned to his book. He flicked through the pages with his thumb, sending up a layer of dust thick enough to build a decent snowman, which he then had to wipe from his eyes before turning to the first page.

_Volume One_. Smegging hell, this volume alone was six hundred pages long, with a table of contents and no dedication. The author was evidently a barrel of laughs.

_The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants..._

“Found it!” Rimmer’s face, flushed an ugly red, popped up over the edge of Lister’s bunk. He pointed towards his revision timetable, up on the far wall, grinning his best self-satisfied grin.

Then his eyes fell on the book and he froze in horror.

“You alright, man?” Lister nudged; his attention already entirely drawn from his reading.

“What are you reading?”

“A book.”

“I can see that. Which book?”

“Just a book, man.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Officer’s library.”

“Lister!” Rimmer gasped. “The officer’s library is strictly off limits for all rank and file personnel. Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take me to write up a report that adequately reflects the seriousness of this offence? Did you consider my feelings at all when you decided to fall back on your lesser nature and pilfer from men who are above you in every way?”

“They’re above me because they’re in heaven.” Lister scoffed. “Smeg off and do your revision, Rimmer. I’ve got some readin’ to do.”

“I can’t revise now! I have a report to write, no thanks to you.”

“Who are you gonna report me to, man? Yerself? It’s you and me and this book on board. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

“Just because we are now operating without higher oversight doesn’t mean we can let our standards slip.” Rimmer retorted. “Besides, you’ve probably picked out some pornographic drivel that’s completely inappropriate for shared quarters and was only in the officer’s library because it had been confiscated. Come on, let me see.”

Lister flipped the book over, presenting the title for Rimmer to review.

Rimmer stared, blinked, stared again, then let his face stoop into a confused frown. “Capital by Karl Marx?”

Lister grinned. “Yeah.”

“Capital by Karl Marx. You’re reading Marx?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Well, back at art college, see, there was this girl I really fancied. Angie Prewitt. Arse like the twin moons of Mars and twice as thick. You would've hated her. But she was well into all this stuff. The working classes rising up, taking a little something back for themselves.”

Rimmer looked like he’d just caught a whiff of a particularly foul trash compactor backfiring. “Preposterous! As if the working classes could rise up. You lower class goits don’t know how good you’ve got it with the rest of us in charge. Throw that book away, Lister. That’s an order.”

“You order me?” Lister raised an eyebrow. “You’re ordering me to throw away what is probably the last surviving copy of one of the most seminal works of political philosophy of the nineteenth century?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I’m not gonna chuck it. This is an important part of Earth culture.”

“Poppycock! It’s a load of waste paper that can only give oiks like you ideas above your station.” Rimmer sniffed and settled his shoulders, clearly overcome by a newfound respect for the upper middle class he hailed from.

“Sounds perfect.” Lister double checked the front cover, scraping away dust to reveal a portrait of a man with a large beard that would definitely have fallen outside JMC standards for personal grooming. “There’s no way I’m getting rid of it now.”

“Lister, I order you-“

“Oh, smeg off. You’re always telling me to read more and now you want to have a go when I find something worth reading? I don’t think so. I reckon I’m gonna take my contraband book that I stole from the offer’s library up to the bridge. I’m gonna plonk my arse in the captain’s chair and I’m gonna have a little read.” And with that, Lister launched himself from the top bunk and headed for the door.

Rimmer rushed to block his way, but Lister walked straight through him without a second thought.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, man.”

“You can’t just want through a hologrammatic officer like that! It’s the height of bad manners. I ought to have you-“

“There’s nothing you can do to me, Rimmer.” Lister continued towards the bridge, but the hologram skipped up to try to cut him off again.

“I said stop.”

“Look, Rimmer.” Lister held up his hands. “I don’t want to be the sort of git who walks through a hologram twice in one day, but you’re not making this easy for me. Can’t you just let me do me own thing?”

“No!”

Lister didn’t hesitate to walk through him five more times before he hit the bridge.

The captain’s chair wasn’t nearly as impressive as the title might have you believe. Captain Hollister was evidently a man who shared Rimmer’s opinions on what constituted comfort. Still, Lister dropped into it just to watch Rimmer crawl another inch closer to short circuiting himself with rage.

“It’s not fair!” Rimmer whined, trying to slam his hand down on the captain’s table and looking rather disappointed with himself when it passed clean through the shiny ceramic top. “You can’t just walk around doing whatever the hell you bloody well want while I’m trying to uphold protocol.”

“Sure I can, watch me.” Lister flipped the book open and started back up where he had left off earlier: _...whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production. Every useful thing..._

“It’s not a fair fight.” Rimmer insisted, loudly and right into Lister’s ear. “I can’t even touch you. How am I supposed to…to…to _do_ anything?”

Once again, the book fell closed. “Listen, Rimmer, I’m gonna make this nice and simple for you: you’re dead, I’m not. I get to do whatever the smeg I want for three million years till we get back to Earth and you get to piss yourself over rules that don’t matter anymore.”

“Of course they matter.”

“I’m being serious, man. Just let it go. It’s painful watching you tie yourself in knots over this stuff.” Lister reached up to pat Rimmer’s shoulder, the way he used to do for Petersen when he got all worked up about the zero grav footy, but his hand sunk straight through the soft edges of Rimmer’s light exterior, earning him a withering look from the shoulder’s owner.

“You’re lucky I have so much revision to do today. Rest assured, millado, if I knew how to open the brig doors I would have shoved you in there.”

“Sure you would, Rimmer. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to read me book.”

For a moment, it seemed as if Rimmer really was going to leave and Lister would be allowed to get to the juicy bits of Marx where he found out how to get people like Rimmer to stop being such toadying little shits all the time, when a drawn out yowl heralded the arrival of the Cat.

And as Rimmer was standing in the doorway, the Cat went straight through him. Seven times in one day, and they’d been so good about not being deathist pricks to him so far.

“Hey, hey, hey, monkeyman!” the Cat stood over the captain’s desk, grinning down at Liser. “I got something for you.”

“For me? You mean like a present?”

“It’s a space weevil.” Rimmer buzzed, his mouth working double time. Lister swore that he let his vocal module slip out of sync with the rest of him on purpose sometimes, for attention.

“Space weevil? Why would I get him a space weevil?” The Cat scowled at Rimmer, then turned back to Lister all smiles. “It’s in my pocket. I really think you’re gonna like it.”

“Yeah?”

“Hell yeah, buddy!”

“Well go on, what is it then?” Red Dwarf was so massive that any trips beyond Rimmer and Lister’s sleeping quarters had the potential to reveal treasures from three million years past. Usually they all kept what they found for themselves, be it remnants of the _Felix Sapiens'_ ship wide empire, or a novelty anime Pez dispenser. Lister had once found a Napoleon funko pop at the bottom of Todhunter’s sundries which he let Rimmer have, and the hologram had been at least ten percent less smeggy to him for the rest of the week.

It could be anything. Lister held out his hand and watched, dismayed, as the Cat dropped a still squirming, mostly dead space weevil into it. He dropped it with a squawk. “What the hell, man?”

“Hey! That was my present to you. I spent all afternoon making it just right. I swear, you monkeys ain’t got no manners.” The Cat dropped to the floor and proceeded to start batting the poor space weevil around like it was a chew toy.

“I got weevil plasma on me hand.” Lister groaned, wiping the thick green gloop on his long johns and immediately regretting it. It was impossible to get this stuff out of anything, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem except it stank to high heaven after a few days left out.

“You idiot. You should know by now that all his presents are dead, bleeding or unsanitary.” Rimmer was trying to turn his nose up at the scene unfolding in front of him but it was too busy being scrunched up as it’s owner tried to block out the stench of punctured weevil bowels.

“I don’t get it. Cat, why did you think I’d like that?”

“He thinks he’s bringing you dinner.” Rimmer explained, before the Cat had a chance to do so himself.

“Is that right?” Lister waved, trying and failing to get the Cat’s attention. “You should know by now that raw insect isn’t really my speed. I’m more into deep fried things that have been slathered in curry sauce.”

“And don’t we all know it.” Rimmer muttered.

“Hey, Cat!”

This time the Cat paid at least some attention, sitting back up on his haunches with the space weevil’s tail poking out between his fangs.

“Been meaning to ask you, do Cat’s kiss?”

The Cat slurped down the remains of the weevil. “Kiss? You mean that monkey thing where you put your tongue in each other’s mouths.”

“Yeah?”

“And you jam your mouths together so you can taste each other’s breath.”

“Yeah.”

“And you wind up sharing saliva with the other person?”

“Exactly.”

“No way, ape breath.” The Cat snorted. “Us felines wouldn’t be caught dead doing something so disgusting.”

Lister turned back to Rimmer, his fist clenched triumphantly overhead. “See? It’s all unnatural. Stupid to get hung up over who’s being unnatural with who.”

“Ah yes, the Cat, avatar of all things idiotic and donkey brained.” Rimmer drawled. “The animal so stupid, he had to be left behind when they popped off to find the holy land for fear he might muck up the oh so difficult task of existing on a space ship much the same as the one he’d lived his whole life on. Truly, a cultural icon who’s expertise cannot be ignored.” Then he turned tail and marched off the bridge, his soft light feet making no sound as he went.

Lister watched the empty space that no longer housed Rimmer, and debated the merits of going after him to annoy him into seeing sense. But he still had his book, and he figured that if he read for an hour, Rimmer wouldn’t be able to nag him about spending the whole day watching TV.

With a flourish of his tailcoat (purple today) the Cat got to his feet and made for the door. “If you don’t mind, I gotta go find a quiet place to give myself a bath. My junk has been getting nasty.”

Lister frowned as the Cat departed, unable to understand how kissing was so awful when licking your own testicles was a daily occurrence.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally supposed to be the start of something much longer, but I lost the motivation for the full fic and I think this works pretty well on its own. 
> 
> You can read the first volume of Capital by Karl Marx [here](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf)
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)
> 
> Comments are love!


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